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After a lot of thought, I've decided to take a break from blogging for the foreseeable future. With my little C creeping its way back into my life and possible long term treatment now, I need to take a couple of things off my plate for the time being, and the blog is going to be one of those things. As it is, it felt like it was becoming more of a chore than anything else. I need my reading time to be more enjoyable right now, more of the escape that I really need, and what I don't need is the little voice in the back of my head telling me how many reviews I'm behind and trying to come up with what I need to say about the book.

I simply want to read.

I'll more than likely occasionally post on here what I've been reading, and if there is something that really blows my mind, I'll probably have more to say about it and may write up a proper post, but for right now, things are going to be very quiet around here.

As always, happy reading!

2017 edit

I will continue to blog according to my health and ability, and connecting my posts thru Goodreads, so please be patient if things get quiet around here again this year.

2017 edit #2

I am happy to report that my bone marrow transplant was a success and that I'm feeling more like myself everyday. That said, I'm going to try to start blogging a little more frequently, but please bare with me as I still continue to recover.

Monday, May 30, 2016

In this dystopian scifi thriller, video games have become a national pastime sport, with tournaments broadcast on television networks and the players in these virtual worlds are just as famous as athletes are in our world, larger-than-life superstars with high end sponsors and all the fame and notoriety that goes along with those roles. Kali Ling, a member of Team Defiance, the number one team in the virtual gaming world until an unexpected and overwhelming defeat in the semifinal rounds of the RAGE tournaments, becomes the first female captain of a RAGE team in its history. She is also of Asian descent, so she also has to deal with that aspect of her life in the gaming world as well.

This is all set up fairly early on, after the Team Defiance upset by an unknown team. The team is sent out to the clubs by their sponsors to make sure that everything still seems normal. After a night of partying, Kali's teammate and friend-with-benefits, Nathan, ODs on the drug HP and dies. She's clearly torn up about this until Nathan's replacement is introduced the next day. (Nathan who?) Burdened with everything the virtual world throws at her, she too turns to drugs and sex and wild living, until she realizes that she's slowly throwing her life away. (Hello, after school special).

Overall, there was a lot of potential here, but I felt it got bogged down in trying to redeem Kali. The gaming world seemed really intense, given that anything that happened in VR, the players felt IRL. However, the games themselves didn't seem all that exciting; I guess I was just expecting more from the VR gaming world here, other than what felt like glorified capture the flag, but with swords and virtual death. I also felt that Jennings was having a hard time deciding what type of book this was supposed to be: was she going for edgy YA? Moral lessons wrapped in adult ambiguity when it comes to sex, drugs, and clubbing? Spiritual coming of age? I also felt that Jennings was trying far too hard to make everybody happy, and checking off all the necessary ticks on a list: Female lead? Check. Character of Asian descent? Check. Lesbian couple? Check. Black character? Check. Making sure female lead is a total kick ass character? Check.

To be honest, by the end of the book, I found myself skimming huge swaths of text, as I really just wanted to get to the end of the story, and I didn't really care all that much about what happened to anybody. Clearly, this book just wasn't for me.

Weird, weird, weird. Joe finds a black lab puppy while on an out-of-town business meeting and decides that it's his responsibility to rescue the puppy from its owners, who may or may not be neglecting it. Thru a series of more and more bizarre events, we watch Joe's life spiral out of control over the course of one weekend as he takes one extreme action after another in order to "rescue" this dog. He loses his job, alienates his friends, is beat up, and eventually arrested. All in this weekend, all over a dog he had never seen before. I'm not really sure what the point of the story is? Maybe there isn't meant to be a point, but the feel good ending didn't quite somehow mesh with the rest of the story. The art and writing are sparse and direct, which helps add to the story's semi-noir crime feeling.

Much like the TV series, I'm still left very much "meh" when it comes to this story. The art here, presented in B&W, is good, and the writing isn't necessarily bad, it just leaves something to be desired for me. I'll give the second volume a try and if it doesn't really capture my attention more, I think I'm going to give up on TWD entirely.

Monday, May 9, 2016

A reread for me from when I was younger, there isn't much I'll be able to add to the discussion on this book that hasn't already been said. Reading this as an adult now, tho, I can definitely appreciate the finer and more subtle points of the story.

After reading this collection of Free Comic Day stories (these tales are short stories telling the history of characters in the current Mouse Guard volumes), I remembered how much I enjoy Petersen's art and storytelling. I'm definitely going to have to revisit Mouse Guard and get reacquainted with these characters.

Saturday, May 7, 2016

Thoroughly enjoyed this first volume. I think it expertly answers the question of what would happen if gods actually existed in today's social media crazed society: instead of being worshiped as just gods, they would be worshiped as rockstars, and they would play the part accordingly. I'm really interested to see where the rest of this series goes.

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

The third volume in the Love series of graphic novels, The Lion (I have not yet read the first, The Fox, or second, The Tiger), follows what I understand to be the same format as previous volumes: what we are silently presented is a day in the life of a lion, one who has no pride of his own and who is trying to find his way in the jungle that day. Presented with no text whatsoever, Brrémaud's writing and Bertolucci's illustrations are both to-the-point and poignant, showing what could happen in the jungle at any point in a day, and that it is not always pretty in nature.

I'll be looking for the rest of the volumes in this series.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher thru NetGalley for a fair and honest review.

Monday, May 2, 2016

I'm not entirely sure that I understand everything that went on in Uriarte's The White Donkey: Terminal Lance (a lot of the military jargon was lost on me, and it wasn't always easy to distinguish between characters as many of them looked the same), but I think Uriarte manages to give the reader a normally unseen aspect of what it's like to be a Marine, and how that can affect you, regardless of how much action you see. The writing and art is good (even tho, as previously mentioned, it was sometimes hard to distinguish between some characters), but I probably won't read anything else by Uriarte based on his Terminal Lance online comic strip. Just isn't entirely my thing, but for military enthusiasts, I think this would be a great book.

I received a finished copy of this book from the publisher for a fair and honest review.